Tag Archives: China

Another Claim of ‘Mission Accomplished’ Collapses, by Alastair Crooke

Posted on June 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s been a long time since the US government had a foreign policy “mission accomplished.” From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

A provocation at the al-Aqsa enclosure by one or other of the extreme Settler cults, is not probable – it is inevitable, Alastair Crooke writes.

The post WW2 policy iceberg – like that of the Artic Cap – may still be solid – but only just. And, like the real Ice Cap, it too is disintegrating. It no longer serves purpose for our internationalist oligarchs. Bits of it are crumbling; some are purposefully being offered up (i.e. Gates/Fauci). Though, to extend this metaphor to geo-politics would be to say that we may be on the cusp of a multi-facetted cascade of the post-war, ‘forever’ political certainties – some intended; many not; but all disruptive.

On the one hand, the U.S. outsized military establishment demands a new raison d’être – just as Russia and China unveil their smart new weaponry. The ‘bigger play’, of course, is that the social decay eating away at the fabric of America has become all too visible – and damaging to the desired recasting of the American mission (Green-washing and now LBGTQ ‘washing’ – as mechanisms to firstly disrupt, and then reset, politics and geo-finance).

Belligerent ‘competition’ with China is ramped as the means to reunite this fragmented America. Yet, however much Washington keeps pushing Europe and Japan to decouple from both China and Russia, a Cold War 2.0 on two simultaneous fronts has very few takers. The (self-harming) EU provocations of China and Russia over Belarus or the Uyghurs – as naively woke, as they are – are no accident, however.

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Taiwan Is a Country in All But Name: Still, That Doesn’t Mean America Should Defend It, by Doug Bandow

Posted on June 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here’s a paradox. Almost nobody in this country would want to send our sons and daughters off to defend Taiwan if it was invaded by China, and most people would correctly say we’d get our butts kicked big time if we did. Yet, if China invaded Taiwan, it’s a near certainty the establish would have us in that war. From Doug Bandow at antiwar.com:

Even the biggest, toughest, meanest movie characters go wobbly when facing the Great Panda. At least when Chinese nationalism demands they kowtow to its demands.

The latest Hollywood wimp who plays a real man on screen is John Cena. The former wrestler, when promoting his role in Fast & Furious 9, stated that Taiwan was a country. After realizing his “mistake,” he immediately prostrated himself and groveled before what he hoped would be a massive Chinese audience for his movie: “I made a mistake, I must say right now. It’s so so so so so so important, I love and respect Chinese people.”

But not, obviously the Taiwanese people.

Alas, abasing himself did not appear to help the film, whose Chinese ticket sales plummeted – though some critics ascribed that to negative reviews rather than Cancel Culture, China-style. In any case, the cringe-worthy spectacle, however sensible from a profit-maximizing standpoint, left Cena’s manhood on the floor. He will long suffer from snarky memes about needing a backbone transplant.

However, the controversy raises a larger issue. Does it matter for U.S. policy if Taiwan is a country? Does that designation determine whether Washington should defend Taipei from Chinese attempts at coercion, whether threats or actual invasion?

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments

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Fauci’s NIH Funded Wuhan Military Scientist Who Died Mysteriously After Filing COVID Vaccine Patent, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

To the dismay of Anthony Fauci, among others, the origins of the Covid-19 virus story are being peeled back like an onion, and it’s liable to end in tears. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

As we move further down the rabbit hole of exactly what in the devil has been going on in China’s ‘bat labs,’ we now turn our attention to one Zhou Yusen – a Chinese military scientist specializing in coronaviruses who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman,” Zhengli Shi – with at least one project to geneticially manipulate coronaviruses having been funded by three grants from the National Institutes of Heath (NIH)  – home to Dr. Anthony Fauci – via US universities, according to documents obtained by The Weekend Australian‘s Sharri Markson – who has written an upcoming book, “What really happened in Wuhan.” The previously undisclosed NIH funding of a PLA military scientist is separate from millions in grants awarded EcoHealth alliance, which also collaborated with the WIV.

The revelation shows American money was funding risky ­research on coronaviruses with People’s Liberation Army scientists – including decorated military scientist Zhou Yusen and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman”, Shi Zhengli.

Now we learn that Zhou, 54, is dead – three months after filing a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in Feb. 2020.

Zhou Yusen, Zhengli Shi

According to the report, Zhou’s May 2020 death went largely under the radar, despite the fact that he was an award-winning scientist at the PLA’s Laboratory of Infection and Immunity at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology. “There were no reports paying tribute to his life. His death was only mentioned in passing in a Chinese-media report in July and at the end of a December scientific paper. Both had the word ­“deceased” in brackets after his name.”

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Posted in Governments, Investigations, Medicine, Military, Politics, Propaganda

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Are Tesla’s Sudden China Woes A Harbinger Of Things To Come? by Fan Yu

Posted on June 7, 2021 | 1 comment

The thing about doing business in a command economy is you’ve got to stay in good with the commanders, who are sometimes known to be capricious. From Fan Yu at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

o see the impact China’s fickle market can do to a company’s value, look no further than Tesla.

On April 20, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s media and regulators began a series of public rebukes against the California-based electric carmaker. The criticisms were broad, ranging from Tesla’s car safety, to data gathering practices, as well as customer service.

In early June, technology website The Information reported that Tesla’s May China orders fell by nearly half compared to April, according to internal data. Orders fell from 18,000 in April to 9,800 in May, a reflection that Chinese consumers were negatively impacted by the uproar.

And all of this has erased $137 billion in market value as Tesla’s stock price declined 19.5 percent since April 21.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Tesla has encountered issues all year in China. In February and March, the CCP banned Tesla from its military compounds and housing units on concerns that the company could collect information via the cameras attached to Tesla cars to facilitate spying on behalf of the United States.

In early April, Tesla’s communications and governmental affairs director in China announced that any data collected within China would be stored in China and will not be sent to the United States, in an effort to quell CCP security concerns. This came about after founder and CEO Elon Musk publicly declared that Tesla would not engage in spying.

On April 20, CCP mouthpiece Xinhua published an article from the sidelines of the Shanghai Auto Show slamming the electric vehicle maker on the quality of its vehicles, citing consumer complaints.

On the same day, an official post on WeChat from the account of the powerful Commission for Political and Legal Affairs also drew attention to the Auto Show, when a woman climbed onto the roof of a Tesla vehicle to complain about her car’s faulty brakes. The video of the woman went viral on Chinese social media. While it’s unclear why the CCP organ which oversees the country’s police and court system would weigh in on electric cars, it was nonetheless a powerful rebuke of Tesla.

While Tesla China originally pushed back against this narrative, stating that the woman in question has been protesting against Tesla for some time, later during the same week the company issued a public apology and promised to better listen to customer complaints.

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Media Converges On The Narrative That UFOs May Be Russian/Chinese Threat, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on June 6, 2021 | 1 comment

Never let a good excuse to increase the military’s budget go to waste. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

So in case you haven’t been keeping up it’s been pretty thoroughly confirmed that the US government’s highly anticipated UFO report due this month won’t contain any significant revelations and certainly won’t verify anyone’s ideas about these phenomena being extraterrestrial in origin, but it absolutely will contain fearmongering that UFOs could be evidence that the US has fallen dangerously behind Russian and Chinese technological development in the cold war arms race.

Unknown US officials have done a print media tour speaking to the press on condition of anonymity (of course), with first The New York Times reporting their statements about the contents of the UFO report and then CNN and The Washington Post. Each of these outlets reported the same thing: the US government doesn’t know what these things are but is very concerned they constitute evidence that Russia and/or China have somehow managed to technologically leapfrog US military development by light years. All three mention these two nations explicitly.

This narrative was then picked up by cable news, with MSNBC inviting former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta on to explain to their audience that the US government should assume UFOs are Russian or Chinese in origin until that possibility has been exhausted.

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How St. Petersburg Is Mapping The Eurasian Century, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on June 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

As the US flounders, Eurasia goes stronger. From Pepe Escobar at The Asian Times via zerohedge.com:

While G7, NATO and US-EU summits – all platforms for US power projection – will highlight European irrelevance…

It’s impossible to understand the finer points of what’s happening on the ground in Russia and across Eurasia, business-wise, without following the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

So let’s cut to the chase, and offer a few choice examples of what is discussed on top panels.

The Russian Far East – Here’s a discussion on the – largely successful – strategies boosting productive investment in industry and infrastructure across the Russian Far East. Manufacturing in Russia grew by 12.2% between 2015 and 2020; in the Far East it was almost double, 23.1%. And from 2018 to 2020, per capita investment in fixed capital was 40% higher than the national average. The next steps center on improving infrastructure; opening global markets to Russian companies; and most of all, finding the necessary funds (China? South Korea?) for advanced tech.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – As I’ve seen for myself in previous editions of the forum, there’s nothing remotely similar in the West in terms of seriously discussing an organization like the SCO – which has progressively evolved from its initial security focus towards a wide-ranging politico-economic role.

Russia presided the SCO in 2019-2020, when foreign policy got a fresh impetus and the socioeconomic consequences of Covid-19 were seriously addressed. Now the collective emphasis should be on how to turn these member nations – especially the Central Asian “stans” – more attractive for global investors. Panelists include former SCO secretary-general Rashid Alimov, and the current one, Vladimir Norov.

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Escobar: Mapping The Post-Unilateral World Order

Posted on June 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

Russia and China have done a masterful job of countering the US’s designs on a unipolar world order, of course headed by the US. From Pepe Escobar at zerohedge.com:

As Sino-Russo-Iranophobia dissolves in sanctions and hysteria, mapmakers carve the post-unilateral order…

It’s the Nikolai Patrushev-Yang Jiechi show – all over again. These are the two players running an up and coming geopolitical entente, on behalf of their bosses Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Last week, Yang Jiechi – the director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee – visited Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev in Moscow. That was part of the 16thround of China-Russia strategic security consultations.

What’s intriguing is that Yang-Patrushev happened between the Blinken-Lavrov meeting on the sidelines of the Arctic Council summit in Reykjavik, and the upcoming and highest-ranking Putin-Biden in Geneva on June 16 (possibly at the Intercontinental Hotel, where Reagan and Gorbachev met in 1985).

The Western spin before Putin-Biden is that it might herald some sort of reset back to “predictability” and “stability” in currently extra-turbulent US-Russia relations.

That’s wishful thinking. Putin, Patrushev and Lavrov harbor no illusions. Especially when in the G7 in London, in early May, the Western focus was on Russia’s “malign activities” as well as China’s “coercive economic policies.”

Russian and Chinese analysts, in informal conversations, tend to agree that Geneva will be yet another instance of good old Kissingerian divide and rule, complete with a few seducing tactics to lure Moscow away from Beijing, an attempt to bide some time and probing openings for laying out geopolitical traps. Old foxes such as Yang and Patrushev are more than aware of the game in play.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics, Propaganda

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Why Consumer Price Inflation Is Here To Stay, by MN Gordon

Posted on June 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

Chinese imports have long kept a lid on US prices, but that’s fading. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Jerome Powell might be done as a useful Federal Reserve Chairman.  Not that Fed Chairs provide a use that’s of any real value.  They mainly excel at destroying the wealth of wage earners and savers for the benefit of member banks.

But as Powell loses a grip on price inflation the business of supplying credit at a fixed rate of return becomes less fruitful.  Consumer price inflation, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), is rising at an annual rate of 4.2 percent.  That’s well above interest rate of a 30 year fixed mortgage, which is currently 3.1 percent.

It doesn’t take much imagination to foresee a CPI over 6 percent.  At that rate of price inflation, what good to the bank is a home loan that’s only paying 3 percent?  This, among other reasons, is why Jay Powell is toast.

Powell, no doubt, has been going along to get along since long before he took over the reins of the Federal Reserve.  He’s always done what everyone asked.  He’s rapidly expanded the Fed’s balance sheet to fund massive government deficits and backstop the mortgage market.

Of course, he’s not alone.  The central planners in the U.S. and abroad manufactured this price inflation through decades of mass money printing, credit market intervention, and currency devaluations.  Anyone with half a brain knew the day would come when the glut of money and credit would jack up consumer prices.  Quite frankly, what took so long?

This is a complex question to answer.  One that’s much to intricate for us to comprehend.  Still, today we attempt to unfold one wrinkle of the complexity:

How the delicate trade relationship between the U.S. and China suppressed consumer prices in the U.S. over the last three decades…and how that delicate relationship has reversed to exasperate rising consumer prices going forward.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Financial markets, Governments, Trade

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The Geopolitics of Gold, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on June 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

If the world goes gold, and there’s every reason to think it will, sooner or later, the Chinese will be sitting in the catbird seat. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

A number of events are coming together which are set to push gold prices higher. Besides a combination of continuing inflationary policies and massive future budget deficits undermining the dollar, by closing down derivative market activities new Basel 3 regulations appear set to deflect some demand into physical metals. Furthermore, liquidity in gold markets will contract, potentially making prices more volatile

This article looks at how these developments will affect the undeclared but very real financial and propaganda war being waged by America against China.

China is moving on, enlarging its own middle class which will benefit from a stronger yuan, much as the German and Japanese economies did between 1970—2000. Having dominated economic developments until now, the export trade is becoming less important. With this dependency lessening, the argument in favour of a coup de grace against the dollar by China revealing its true gold position is increasing.

In this article, China’s undeclared gold reserves are quantified, and we can be confident that China has at least 20,000 tonnes “off balance sheet”. For China to openly declare her gold position always was her final, almost nuclear option in the financial war waged against her by America. Unwittingly, by diverting demand from paper gold to physical bullion, Basel 3 may have brought forward that day by default.

Introduction

The imminent introduction of Basel 3’s net stable funding ratio is going to have a major impact on the global banking system, and it is a reasonable assumption that government agencies concerned with geopolitical implications will be considering it from that point of view. And nowhere is this more important than for gold, and by implication the dollar’s unrivalled hegemony.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Capitalism, Currencies, Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Governments, History

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A Sinking Ship of State Drowns Everyone, by Lawrence Kadish

Posted on June 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

Debt is always weakness. As the US government flounders under its mountain of debt, other countries will take advantage of its fiscal weakness. From Lawrence Kadish at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.
  • For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.
  • What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.
  • Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.
  • This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.
(Image source: iStock)

One suspects that historians and economists will consistently agree on one irrefutable fact: nations that allow their economies to bathe in red ink are destined to fail. This failure takes many roads and differs in timing, but massive, uncontrolled national deficits eventually reduce a nation state to being a pauper, a pariah — and pathetic.

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Posted in Collapse, Debt, Economics, Economy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Taxes

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